A blog published earlier this month by Pioneer shined a light on Massachusetts’ growing dilemma: More people are leaving the state than coming here. According to Pioneer’s Massachusetts IRA Data Discovery website, Middlesex and Suffolk counties are losing the most residents.
According to Pioneer Institute’s MassOpenBooks, the two construction companies that have been paid the most by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are first, GLX contractors, which you can learn more about here: https://pioneerinstitute.org/blog/blog-better-government/blog-transparency/the-green-line-extension-project-progress-and-finances/. Second is Suffolk Construction Contractors. Suffolk is a construction contracting company founded and based in Boston that has a current contract with the Massachusetts Port Authority for the renovation of Boston’s Logan International Airport. In 2014, Massport began planning renovations for Logan Airport because of increasing passenger demand. More gates are being added to allow more jets. Logan was originally built in 1923, before the wide body jets that Logan now accommodates on a daily basis were invented. Terminal E, which serves international flights, will expand by […]
Football fans across the country wait in anticipation for the start of the 2022 season which is right around the corner. The UMass Minutemen’s first game is on September 3rd against Tulane University. The Minutemen are a part of the NCAA Division I Independent Schools, but a fact college football fans may not know is the salary of head coaches. From 2018 to 2021, the head coach of the Minutemen was Walter Bell, who according to Pioneer Institute’s MassOpenBooks, had a salary of $652,866 making him the seventh highest paid employee in the University of Massachusetts system in 2021. Bell was also the seventh highest paid employee at UMass in 2020 with a salary of $618,683, and in 2019 […]
Earlier this month, a Boston Globe article informed Boston residents that they may have to wait another four months before the rest of MBTA’s 4.7-mile Green Line Extension connecting Lechmere to Medford and Somerville is complete. The new extension was originally supposed to open last December. The date was moved to May, and it’s now expected to open in late summer, according to an MBTA spokesperson. The Green Line extension past Lechmere was originally promised during the Big Dig in 1990, but was later put on hold due to going over budget. In 2007, the state began planning the extension again and in 2013 awarded a contract to White-Kiewit-Skanska to begin construction. In the best Big Dig tradition, the […]
In 2010, Brighton High School in Boston had an enrollment of 1,208 students, according to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. That year, the school’s graduation rate was 57.1 percent of the 224 students in the senior class according to Pioneer Institute’s MassReportCards graduation rate statistics. Five years later in 2015, Brighton High School had 974 total students enrolled with a 61.1 percent graduation rate. In 2020, they had 535 students enrolled with a 54.7 percent graduation rate and the most recent year on record, 2021, Brighton HS had 402 students enrolled with a 68.2 percent graduation rate. Overall, Brighton High School’s enrollment has been dropping in the past decade, but their graduation rates have been increasing, which […]
Suffolk County, Massachusetts consists of the cities of Boston, Chelsea, Winthrop, and Revere. According to the Pioneer Institute’s MassEconomix website, 644,363 people were employed in Suffolk County in 2020. So which industry is the county’s biggest employer? Since 2004, the first year in the MassEconomix database, the largest industry sector in Suffolk County has been healthcare and social assistance. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the healthcare and social assistance industry sector as trained professionals who work in “establishments providing medical care exclusively, continuing with those providing health care and social assistance, and finally finishing with those providing only social assistance.” In 2010, 122,343 employees worked in healthcare and social assistance, comprising a total of 21.4 percent […]
An article published in May by WBUR shined a light on the recent rise in catalytic converter theft (a part of the exhaust system in cars and trucks) across Massachusetts. This raises the question of whether property crime, and more specifically motor vehicle theft, is increasing in Massachusetts especially in Boston, Lowell, and Worcester, the three largest cities in the eastern half of the commonwealth. Contrary to what the catalytic converter thieves may have you believe, overall property crime in these three Massachusetts cities has dropped dramatically since 2010. According to Pioneer Institute’s MassAnalysis website, Boston, the commonwealth’s largest city, had 3,203 property crimes per 100,000 of the population in 2010. In 2020, the most recent year available on the […]